Three skills decide whose career grows and whose stalls. None of them show up on the "future skills" lists consulting firms publish every year. :D

The first is ~ attention to detail ~
Decades of research on personality and work keep landing on the same finding: conscientiousness predicts job performance better than any other trait studied.

The second is the ~ ability to learn ~.
Most people stop learning around 30 and ride the skill stack they built in their twenties for the next thirty years. The World Economic Forum keeps reporting that the useful life of a technical skill is now around five years and shrinking.


The third is ~ ability to tame your ego ~
This is the prerequisite for the second. You can't learn something if your ego won't let you admit you don't know it yet.
Research on intellectual humility from Duke keeps showing that people who can openly say "I don't know this" perform better and earn more trust from their teams.

A lot of what looks like career stagnation between 35 and 50 is just an ego problem, really.

#career